Thursday, February 07, 2013

To Think or Not to Think: A Muslim's "Outrageous Fortune"

In
his penetrating essay on the futility of Islam's efforts to "reform"
itself through revolution, "régime change," or purification, "Springtime
for Islam" (February 5th), Daniel Greenfield noted:

There is a
peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature,
each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping
with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.

"Reform,"
of course, means to change oneself or some institution for the better, from bad
and corrupt to good and pure, or at least to the unobtrusive benign. But, as
Greenfield points out and stresses, the Arab Spring is in reality a
continuation of an ongoing "Arab Winter." The "Arab Spring"
was fueled by Islam, and Islam is, by its foundational nature, destructive and
self-destructive.

Islam's only
redemption is in establishing a theocracy. Its commitment to power and the
indulgence of the earthly and heavenly paradise of loot, slaves and violence,
led to its own degeneration over and over again. Having no other spiritual form
than the exercise of power, it has corrupted itself each time, and then
attempted to exorcise the corruption through more of the same.

Any
theocracy must be totalitarian. It
can become totalitarian by default or happenstance or by negligence, or it can
become totalitarian according to an instruction manual written by clerics and intellectuals
friendly to what they know in their minds are dystopias for the masses and
paradises for the rulers. Islam has its instruction manuals.

Islam
governs an individual's life from his sandals to his beard, from his diet to
the number of times a day he must demonstrate fealty to his icons, to how he
may lawfully (per Sharia law) treat his wives and children. It governs his social
relationships with his friends and enemies, and his enemies are everyone who is not Muslim.
The Koran,
the Hadith,
and the Reliance of the Travelerall command it. They are how-to manuals written
chiefly in Arabic and translated into a dozen languages.

A Muslim
accepts this state of submission – whether or not he's read all the manuals
from beginning to end – for a variety of reasons, none of them complimentary
and too often those reasons become a Molotov cocktail blend waiting to explode:
a repressed, unacknowledged fear of the mortal consequences of not conforming; mental inertia,
encouraged by an unquestioning faith in non-evidentiary assertions; a
delusional sense of superiority (qua
Muslim, and qua Muslim male); a sense
of predestination; an attitude of privilege and expectation of deference; and a
borrowed sense of omniscience.

A

fter
all, the propaganda goes, Islam will conquer men, neighborhoods, cities,
nations, and the globe. It is written. Fealty to Islam gives a rank-and-file
Muslim the comforting confidence that he's on the winning side. Why bother to
think about it? Islam is like an advancing glacier, and he is but a lump of ice
on it. He doesn’t mind. He knows that he's just dross, a grain of ballast that helps
to keep the Islamic corsair upright and afloat and its sails taut in the wind.

Islam
cannot be "reformed" unless its caretakers repudiate its instruction
manuals. But their repudiation would necessarily entail the repudiation of
Islam. When the manuals go up in flames, so will Islam.

Writing
about the turmoil in the Middle East over the past two years, Greenfield bursts
the balloon, which has mesmerized Western leaders and the Mainstream Media, that
the turmoil represents a kind of weird "jihad" among Muslims to find
"democracy" and stability and a just society.

Apologists for
Islamism like to portray those groups as liberation movements, but there is
nothing liberating about terrorist groups run by millionaires and billionaires,
doctors and other degree holders, and funded by the ruling clans of Kuwait, the
UAE and Saudi Arabia. These ruling families have the most to lose from
modernization, and though they build skyscrapers in their cities, they also
helped orchestrate the Arab Spring to topple more modern governments and
replace them with parties affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Turkey,
which seemed to be sliding towards Westernization, has succumbed to the
intrinsic malaise that Islam inculcates in any culture, and has rejected the
West. It now has a leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who announced his Islamic
fealty long ago:

In a public gathering in 1998, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the ruling Islamist party and current
Prime Minister of Turkey, recited:
"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our
bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..." These words earned him a
conviction and minor jail-term for inciting religious hatred.

He
has made good on his poetry,
and has accelerated Turkey's collapse into an Islamic polity.

After
an interminable wait to be admitted into the European Union (a rather dubious
benefit, given the shaky economic and political condition of the EU), Erdoğan
has now spurned the chance and wishes to join a cabal of authoritarian
governments dominated by China and Vladimir Putin's Russia, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization.

Totalitarian
or authoritarian states will not automatically move in the direction of
"democracy" or Western values unless they renounce their obsession
with power. The Mideast, however, is now a battleground for power between
Islamic factions. The "Arab Spring," as Greenfield portrays it, was
simply a rerun of past Mideast "rebellions" and
"revolutions" and upheavals, only with different faces, mobs, slogans
and weapons.

Islam
in any country where it has reigned for decades will not let that country go. Like
a tapeworm, it gnaws away at men's minds and the culture until the men and the
culture submit and accept Islam as a parasite by right.

Let
us imagine that a work-a-day, average, devout Muslim permits himself a secret,
muffled chuckle about his conundrum and how deep a hole he has dug himself into
by just "going with the Islamic flow," and is content with being a grain
of ballast in the Islamic ship-of-state. He might laugh at himself, but what is
it that he would really be laughing about when he's brought to the brink of
doubt or bothers to entertain speculation, especially about Islam? The
ludicrousness of his beliefs, of his unquestioned assumptions, and the ubiquitous
banality of the evil they foster, when they are brought into the unforgiving
sunlight of reason and rationality.

A Muslim who still retains a shred of repressed rationality would think in a
surreptitious manner it would be hard for any normal person to imagine: What?
Why do I suspect in the darkest corner of my heart that Allah is really a
psychopathic, whim-worshipping deity whom I would not want for a parent?

What?
Was Mohammed, our faceless poster boy of virtue and goodness, really a brigand
who founded a religion to justify his sociopathic habits, such as murder,
pedophilia, rape, betrayal, dishonesty, and plunder? What? If Islam is so
benevolent and peace-loving and magnanimous, why does it promise eternal hell
and the most agonizing torments of apostates
and non-believers?

What?
That man over there has his own deity, and I have mine, yet I am expected to
slit his throat for not believing in mine, while he would never think to slit
mine for not believing in his? What? What have these children done that they
deserve to have guns put to their heads and murdered? What? Why are young girls
tortured by clitirectomies?

What?
What possesses parents when they conspire to murder their own daughters? Where
is the "honor" in killing them because they wished to escape the
suffocating ethos and burqas? What? How is beating one's wife for simple
infractions or for disobedience an act of justice? How heinous a crime is it
for a wife to glance at another man, and is it more heinous to murder her for
it?

What?
If infidel women who do not cover up are filthy whores, would it not make sense
to not rape them, and not risk contracting their filth? What?
If alcohol is evil, why does it make so many people happy? Is happiness evil? What?
Why do I deny myself everything that seems to allow infidels and even Jews to
enjoy living?

What?
Can Allah be so pleased with having created so many unhappy, envious, and
hateful beings – as we are?

Envy
in a Muslim may not necessarily lead to crime. He would need to hide it from
his fellows. Jealousy, another powerful emotion, however, can lead to hate and
trigger the crimes and irrationality a Muslim may harbor doubts about. It's up
to him which way he goes.

The Muslim who asks himself those questions, becomes an apostate. But there
aren't very many of them running around, are there? That is because Islam is a nihilistic,
totalitarian ideology, perfect for anyone who refuses to think. Those who
choose to think are marked for a fatwa and termination. They know it. That
takes courage and honesty, and a commitment to reality, actions possible only
to an individual who chooses to think.

They,
better than anyone else, more than any non-Muslim scholar who questions the
morality and feasibility of Islam, know that Islam cannot be "reformed,"
not in its doctrines, not through revolution or régime change or rioting in
Tahir Square or fighting each other in Syria.

5 comments:

Islam is at root a military movement. As such it should not be considered a religion for purposes of the 1st Amendment. It should either be severely restricted or banned. Muslims should be incrementally deported (pay them for their property but kick them out). Mosques should ALL be closed down as they are ENEMY BEACHHEADS.

The failure to properly identify Islam as a warrior ideology and a military / political movement hostile the existence of ALL non-Muslim people is the singular failure or the West in general and the Objectivist movement in particular. Objectivist have been PATHETIC on this subject with a few exceptions; Ed Cline being one of the few mainstream O'ists to understand the evil of Islam.

ARI's view has been flawed. It only wants to deal with the military aspects of the conflict, and it still uses that pathetic weasel expression "totalitarian Islam" or "Islamist". These are expressions that indicate weakness and cowardice. Islam is our enemy not "Islamism", what the fuck ever that is. But the solution to our problem is to REMOVE Muslims from the West. If there were no Muslims in America there would have been no 9/11. This should be simple for a philosophy that claims to be for "living life on earth." Yet most mainstream O'ists won't even shut down the Ground Zero Mosque project. What a joke.

Objectivism should be leading the way on the war against Islam but they are not. The Objectivist movement has bee less than useless. IMO, Rand would spit on the Objectivist movement as it is today. One only can imagine what she would have said about Islam and today's Left. It would make Peikoff look seem tame.

"... the solution to our problem is to REMOVE Muslims from the West"--and, I might add, from the EAST: which part of "the solution" certainly entails a "military aspect"--and which, moreover, "tame" Peikoff advocated, at least for terrorists and their enablers, way back when; and still does advocate (to my knowledge). I don't know what Ayn Rand could possibly have said, that would make Peikoff's NYT plea to "END STATES" appear as "tame"! (Do you?)

"If there were no Muslims in America there would have been no 9/11." .... Perhaps not; but then again, there were certainly means other than what were used, and which would not have depended on residency, to accomplish the atrocity. So then, even if there are no Muslims in America, if there are Muslims of sufficient number anywhere in the world, who have not been properly subjugated, there could be (and almost certainly will be) a--say--9/11/21. Which brings us right back to the first (and by my reckoning, much more important part) of "the solution"; and back, then, to the "military aspects". And if those aspects are ARI's focus--well, so much the better.

Wow, "madmax" (an appropriate handle if there ever was one), in your world thoughts are crimes, speech is murder, mosques are military "beachheads." Do you support "hate speech" laws as well? Do you sympathize with the government's internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII?

In short, do you really believe that deporting American citizens and confiscating their property--not because of their actions, but because of their thoughts--is in keeping with any rational individual's concept of justice?

When they come for you, what will your defense be? That you were simply exercising your First Amendment rights as a citizen? Sorry, but you just surrendered those rights by denying them to others.

"Ed" you're an idiot. Legitimate distinctions can be made based on the grounds of rational philosophy and individual rights. You're approach to Objectivism and the Constitution is a suicide pact, which is typical of mainstream Objectivists, some of the most deluded, weak-willed cowards in the political spectrum.

I'll be brief and try to use words a small mind like yours can understand. Islam represents the threat of initiatory force because it is a war movement that preaches world domination. In fact, conquest of this is earth as at the center of its core. It is in fact a conspiracy with overt acts to further its cause. There is AMPLE precedent in both the fields of law and the military to ban such a violent movement.

There are more things than are dreamt of in your pathetic attempt to understand Rand's philosophy "Ed". Wake the fuck up.